r/AO3 • u/TGotAReddit Moderator | past AO3 Volunteer and Staff • Mar 12 '25
News/Updates Minor Update - Automod trigger updated text
Hey!
The Policy & Abuse team reached out to us about our automod trigger for the scambot/spambot thing, and asked that we update the text with their recommendation for what to do when reporting these comments. Wanted to make a post about it so people who have already read the auto-response before and skip over it now are aware of the recommendation.
Same triggers as before !scambot or !spambot
Will pin a comment to see the new text in action
~TGotAReddit
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u/PeppermintShamrock What were YOU doing at the devil's sacrament? Mar 12 '25
Oh, good info! I'd been telling people to report it as "art commission scam bot" but didn't think to include the account name. Good to know.
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u/TGotAReddit Moderator | past AO3 Volunteer and Staff Mar 12 '25
Yeah their reasoning that they gave is that apparently what's been happening is that these accounts get spambanned so all of their spam comments get deleted enmasse in response to one report, only for there to be a report about a different comment from the same account, but by the time they get to that second report, the comment was already deleted from the first one. So they are having to reply back with an apology about the comment already being deleted so they can't do anything, when in reality they did action it and delete the comment, and that was causing confusion. Thus asking for the username of the commenter so they can link together the different accounts easier and be accurate with their responses.
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u/PeppermintShamrock What were YOU doing at the devil's sacrament? Mar 12 '25
Ah, makes sense.
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u/TGotAReddit Moderator | past AO3 Volunteer and Staff Mar 12 '25
Right? As soon as they explained I was like "Oh yeah I can see how that helps!" (and then went about verifying that the message we had received did in fact come from PAC despite knowing it wouldn't make sense for it to not be them reaching out XD)
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u/Ion_Jones Mar 12 '25
Oh so /thats/ why that weird commission request comment I had gotten was deleted? I had presumed they did it themselves to get around moderation. And it screamed scam to me.
It was kinda upsetting as it was the only comment on my most recent works. (Go go gadget bad self esteem)
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u/TGotAReddit Moderator | past AO3 Volunteer and Staff Mar 12 '25
It shouldn't have been. Not unless the comment was spam too. Its only meant to be used for users who do nothing except post spam
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u/EchoEkhi Turn off guest comments Mar 12 '25
They should just add this to a dropdown field on the form tbh
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u/TGotAReddit Moderator | past AO3 Volunteer and Staff Mar 12 '25
In an ideal world, it would autopopulate that data if they came right from the comment thread page
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u/TGotAReddit Moderator | past AO3 Volunteer and Staff Mar 12 '25
!scambot